During the global pandemic summit, President Biden marked a "tragic milestone" of at least one million deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, and Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt Medical Center, joined Cheddar News to break down the current state of the coronavirus after such a monumental loss of life. "We're not ready yet for mission accomplished, I'm afraid. Although we are moving in the right direction, we're moving from this big pandemic phase where we had big health care crises down to more endemic," he said. "By that, I mean, hospitalizations are going down in a sustained way and there's been a relief of that strain on the healthcare system. However, this virus, this omicron, and its variants continue to be able to spread even among vaccinated people."